I'm currently reading Jerry Kaplan's excellent book "Startup: a Silicon Valley adventure". In this book, Kaplan, founder and CEO of GO Corp., details the founding, financing and eventual demise of his highly innovative company, including the development and workings of their product. What's so surprising about this book is just how timeless it really is - the names and products may have changed, but the business practices and company attitudes surely haven't.

Apple is predominantly about marketing and retailing. It does not actually manufacture anything. It isn't an integrated manufacturer in the same sense as Samsung. It is all about immense media clout; thanks to its immense advertising & PR machine with a humongous budget. This media clout over a period of 30 years has resulted in an army of irrational fan following who would buy every product that comes out of Apple and defend all devious acts of the company. It's amazing that the largest company by market value, despite having highly questionable/monopolistic restrictions with regard to the App store and its iOS platform, attracts no adverse attention by the media and the FTC. The kind of media coverage that Apple gets is incredible!

What Apple is exceedingly good at is create myths. As Eric Raymond has pointed out in the past, “Mac was a slick repackaging of design ideas from an engineering tradition that long predated Jobs[Apple] (in this case, going back to the pioneering Xerox PARC WIMP interfaces of the early 1970s). Which would be fine, except that Jobs created a myth that arrogated that innovation to himself and threw the actual pioneers down the memory hole.”

Raymond went on to state “nearly a quarter-century later Jobs would repeat the same game with the iPhone. The people who did the actual innovating in smartphones – notably Danger with their pioneering Hiptop – got thrown down the memory hole by Jobs’s [Apple's] mythmaking .”

Apple is predominantly about marketing and retailing. It does not actually manufacture anything. It isn't an integrated manufacturer in the same sense as Samsung. It is all about immense media clout; thanks to its immense advertising & PR machine with a humongous budget. This media clout over a period of 30 years has resulted in an army of irrational fan following who would buy every product that comes out of Apple and defend all devious acts of the company. It's amazing that the largest company by market value, despite having highly questionable/monopolistic restrictions with regard to the App store and its iOS platform, attracts no adverse attention by the media and the FTC. The kind of media coverage that Apple gets is incredible!

What Apple is exceedingly good at is create myths. As Eric Raymond has pointed out in the past, “Mac was a slick repackaging of design ideas from an engineering tradition that long predated Jobs[Apple] (in this case, going back to the pioneering Xerox PARC WIMP interfaces of the early 1970s). Which would be fine, except that Jobs created a myth that arrogated that innovation to himself and threw the actual pioneers down the memory hole.”

Raymond went on to state “nearly a quarter-century later Jobs would repeat the same game with the iPhone. The people who did the actual innovating in smartphones – notably Danger with their pioneering Hiptop – got thrown down the memory hole by Jobs’s [Apple's] mythmaking .”

Underlying your position is the assumption that ultimately the reason that people buy Apple products with such enthusiasm is based on some sort of delusional or manipulated basis rather than the fact that Apple simply make things that people, for totally rational reasons, find more attractive than their competitors products.

You do not find Apple's products attractive and fail to see why other people do and thus other people's behaviour is deemed irrational. You are dismissive of the actions of millions as being "an army of irrational fans". You think you are being rational but in reality you are simply demonstrating a profound inability to rationally investigate the real world and understand why things actually happen.

The only reality distortion field around here is the one in the heads of people who think that Apple's success is based on marketing. If one does not recognise that Apple is above all a products company then I fear you may be living in a parallel universe. A universe in which this:

Underlying your position is the assumption that ultimately the reason that people buy Apple products with such enthusiasm is based on some sort of delusional or manipulated basis rather than the fact that Apple simply make things that people, for totally rational reasons, find more attractive than their competitors products.

Aren't many Apple fans doing the same thing, though, when it comes to Android? I can't count how many times I've heard Apple fans, from Gruber to random commenters and people like you, state that the only reason people buy Android phones is because carriers market them so heavily, "rather than the fact that Google/OEMs simply make things that people, for totally rational reasons, find more attractive than their competitors products".

See how this works?

Just to be sure: both positions are wrong. People buy Apple because Apple makes good products AND because they have good marketing - the same reasons they buy
Android.

The only reality distortion field around here is the one in the heads of people who think that Apple's success is based on marketing. If one does not recognise that Apple is above all a products company then I fear you may be living in a parallel universe. A universe in which this:

You really really think advertising budget is all that matters? It's who you market to and how you market it. Apples advertising, while not as costly, is REALLY EFFECTIVE. For you to claim the effectiveness advertising is all about how much money is spent on it is ridiculous. Apple advertisements wins awards. If you think the quality of an advertising campaign (rather than the size and duration) has no appreciable effect on customers, you're living in a land of unicorns.

Furthermore, MARKETING is not just advertising. It is about creating the perceived value, which is mostly about appealing to hipster twats. You can do that without that much advertising. A large part of it can simply be dressing like a hipster twats and you've got those twats' attention.